There's a saying that goes "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit." Sadly, in the case of Martha “Marty” Goddard, her idea would never have flown if she hadn't agreed to let others take all the credit.
In the mid-1970s, Goddard was aghast at the minuscule rate of rapes that were reported and the small fraction of those that ever made it to court. Hospitals had no training in evidence collection, and even when they did, police officers did not know how to preserve it. That changed with the introduction of the “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” which is the trademarked name of what we know now as a rape kit. It is named after Louis Vitullo, the head of the Chicago Police Department's crime lab, but the idea came from Martha Goddard. Vitullo put the kit together after he dismissed Goddard's idea and threw her out of his office.
Goddard not only invented the kit, but also raised the money to produce it, and designed and taught training programs for using it. Read about the invention of the rape kit and the woman who made it work at the Atlantic. -via Kottke
(Image credit: Vartika Sharma)
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